Resistance: An Anthology of Poetry, edited by Nyla Matuk

ONE WAY TO KEEP TRACK OF WHO IS TALKING

If I change one word, I change history. What did I

say today? Do I even remember one word? Writing is

oral tradition. You have to practive the word on

someone before writing it down.

I do not intend to become the world’s greatest Indian

orator. Maybe I might by accident. I might speak my

mind even when running off my mouth like I’m doing.

language finds a tongue. Maybe it will be an Indian

accent.

Counting hostile Indians is made easier because they

don’t talk much or very little. They look the part

—the part in the middle with braids. You never do

know if you are talking to an Indian.

Frozen Indians and frozen conversations predominate.

We mourn the ones at Wounded Knee. Our traditions

buried in one grave. Our frozen circles of silence

do no honour to them. We talk to keep our

conversations from getting too dead. (Marie Annharte Baker)

I was curious to see this new anthology edited by Montreal poet Nyla Matuk, Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry (Montreal QC: Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 2019), a volume of work including contributions by Jordan Abel, Marie Annharte Baker, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Beth Cuthand, Rosanna Deerchild, Marilyn Dumont, Marvin Frances, Louise Bernice Halfe-Sky Dancer, Lee Maracle, Janet Rogers, Armand Garnet Ruffo, Gregory A. Scofield, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, James Arthur, Wayde Compton, Jim Johnstone, El Jones, Christine Leclerc, Canisia Lubrin, Sachiko Murakami, Arleen Paré, Michael Prior, Shane Rhodes, Ingrid Ruthig, Karen Solie, Moez Surani, Derek Webster and Rita Wong. For the purposes of this book, “resistance” seems concurrently an overly general and remarkably precise descriptor, one that acknowledges a building cultural shift over the past decade or so, and the responses to those shifts, as well as to some of those authors who have been already been doing this kind of work for some time. There has been a growing frustration around cultural issues, with subjects such as Idle No More and #MeToo cohering into flourishing movements, something that has been increasingly reflected in Canadian writing and publishing. Young writers such as Billy-Ray Belcourt and Jordan Abel might only have emerged over the past decade or so, but poets such as Armand Garnet Ruffo, Rita Wong and Marie Annharte Baker have been at the forefront of this kind of work for a very long time, so while some of the larger attentions to such issues and ideas might be more recent, the responses to such have existed for decades.

As Matuk writes as part of her introduction: “The poems in this book question the triumphalist, nation-building narratives typical of Canada’s historiography. As a settler-colony, Canada will only find the road to moral ground once it attempts to understand how and why it sits atop land, cultures, significant landmarks, and memories that do not belong to it, and faces its history of irreversible damage to First Nations Peoples, including its genocidal intent; once the state stops taking for granted that its self-declared presence permits access to unceded lands or entitles it to ignore or transgress the territorial or jurisdictional sovereignty of First Nations.” As she writes:

            But colonialism isn’t merely a historic phenomenon we can dismiss as irreversible. It’s an ongoing set of practices negatively affecting human beings and the environment. The poems in this anthology believe that these practices can be confronted. Such decolonization requires art form that re-orient a settler society to bear witness to the standpoint of the colonized. Or at least they may offer a gambit in that direction. The point, to borrow a phrase from feminist political theorist bell hooks, is to move the locus of colonized meaning and knowledge from margin to centre. As writer and activist M. NourbeSe Philip tells us, “the power and threat of the artist, poet or writer lies in this ability to create new i-mages, i-mages that speak to the essential being of the people among whom and for whom the artist creates. If allowed free expression, these images succeed in altering the way a society perceives itself and, eventually, its collective consciousness.”

Writing as a response to politics, I would argue, is a thoroughly postmodern idea: writing that exists as part of the world (and a response to that world) as opposed to the modernist suggestion that writing exists separate from the world. We exist in tandem, and one can’t exist without affecting the other. Why should writing be any different? And some of the strongest writing I’ve seen over the past decade or more has been work that exists within the world, from the geopolitical to the social to the flourishing of eco-poetry.

Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry opens with a land acknowledgment (something I’ve been hearing, increasingly, at literary events the past few years, but hadn’t seen in print), and ends with a variety of statements by a handful of the poets, providing context for them and their works. As Vancouver poet Rita Wong’s statement (clearly composed before her jail time) writes:

In August 2018, while BC was in a state of emergency because of wildfires, breaking records for the second year in a row, I sang and sat in ceremony in front of Kinder Morgan’s Westridge marine terminal for half an hour. For this, I was arrested, and face the threat of 28 days in jail for opposing the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline. My punishment—while Kinder Morgan gets away with clearcutting trees, poisoning the land, air, and water—shows how Canadian laws are dangerously disconnected from the laws of physics, chemistry, and the land itself.

            Where Canadian law is failing to protect us from increasing the likelihood of climate disasters, thankfully we can and are learning from natural law and Indigenous law that we have a reciprocal relationship with the land. We all have a responsibility to care for the land’s health, which is ultimately our health too.

            15,000 scientists have issued a warning letter that we need to make a fast transition to renewable energy. Governments aren’t responding fast enough to the peril that we face due to climate destabilization. On a geological scale, we are in imminent peril now.

            I am just one of over 200 people who have been arrested because we take climate crisis seriously. We cannot afford to let this black snake pipeline acidify the ocean. We stand in solidarity with the land, the water, the earth, and all the relatives protecting our collective future.

This does feel like an important book, furthering a conversation that has been building for quite some time. And what should I, as a straight, male and white writer be doing in my own work? Listening, certainly. Paying better attention to some of these conversations that might make certain people uncomfortable (and rightly so). Sometimes it is better not to speak, but, instead, to help re-broadcast the thoughts and works of another, from conversations around Omar Khadr, poverty, systematic racism, the Kinder Morgan pipeline, unceded territories and a history of genocide against Indigenous people and communities, colonialism, Canada’s history of slavery and the historic erasure of Black neighbourhoods from Vancouver to Halifax, Japanese internment camps, the list of murdered or missing Indigenous women and girls, and the trauma surrounding the Residential Schools system. We can only move forward (whatever that forward might look like) once these conversations and reconciliations are properly addressed, otherwise we are trapped where we stand.

BOUNDARIES

This is dream city, built on shores

still not ceded. This is a city of tourists

with mouths agape, these are my boundaries:

the islands in the Gulf, the sea they might call Salish,

the land taken there, taken again

from another family, that line nearly faltered.

and now a nephew with my father’s grin, the last one.

Between the people and the land, what have I to teach?

to tolerate suburbs? To let the land be covered

with another’s vision, then stretch our line out farther than the

commuter trains,

stop where the valley’s silt turns hills, the residents nearly Albertans.

The time is now, and now, and now; built so fast with minds

less changed, from Expo to Olympics,

a lifetime. More than his. Most of mine. (Sachiko Murakami)

I’ve heard recently (given the combination of federal election and thanksgiving weekend) that politics is something our parents should have taught us not to avoid, but to discuss and inquire about in a respectful, thoughtful manner, far different than a generation or two prior, where politics at the dinner table might have been considered taboo. One hopes that a collection such as this would be taught in schools, both for the writing and the content, to showcase just how much culture is shifting and has already shifted to acknowledge some of these conversations, frustrations and attempts toward reconciliation. Given the volume includes numerous works reprinted from full-length collections, I would suspect that is one of the purposes here. The world is changing. Writing is changing in response. One hopes that enough might be listening.

Four poems for Rita Wong

Vancouver Poet Rita Wong Incarcerated for 4 Weeks 

for Peaceful Anti-pipeline Protest

1.

A handwritten appeal: one shows respect

by speaking honestly. The landscape

is losing patience. My faith

erodes. Your words

are incremental: liquid, ghosts, pure

resilience. This natural history

of the senses.

Lithosphere: this fabric of muscle, bone;

of bodies, maps,

geopolitical collage.

2.

As Dionne Brand wrote: a harmolodic

for the bruised planet. This path of centuries,

an attention

and respect. Deforestation, reigns. A tool

sits coolly in the earth: misplaced,

interred by time, and silt,

ten thousand lunar cycles. How can we live

if all else dies?

3.

They can’t take it with them,

I guess. The world’s lungs

fill up with smoke.

4.

The contempt

is obvious. You resist, for ecological health

and mutual respect, and in response, they place you

in a cold, dark room.

Injunctions, plead. Prompt: once more

unto the breach, my friend, once more.

Or close up the wall with our earthly dead.

Rita Wong and Fred Wah, beholden: a poem as long as the river

FRED WAH – Where did the words come from for what we were doing with the Columbia River?

RITA WONG – Maybe the River gifted us those words. […] (“Afterwords, a Dialogue”)

Furthering the idea of the bio-text into, as the back cover suggests, “the biospheric, the biotextual,” is the book version of Vancouver poets Rita Wong and Fred Wah’s collaborative art-text, beholden: a poem as long as the river (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018). beholden: a poem as long as the river is a project that “arises out of a larger project titled River Relations: A Beholder’s Share of the Columbia River, a collaboration of artists seeking a creative engagement with the Columbia River. […] The poem, represented along a 114-foot banner of the entire Columbia River, has been exhibited as part of a number of gallery presentations displayed in the Pacific Northwest.” As the back cover informs: “We have not lived up to our responsibilities to the river, and we need to do better. The river does not end at its banks, but flows through our sinks and showers, charges our cellphones, and stirs our thoughts about treaties.”

Existing as both poetry title and exhibition catalogue, beholden: a poem as long as the river displays the entirety of the 114-foot banner in book form: two lines of text rolling, looping and crossing a full colour illustration of the Columbia River. Set as twin lyrics in conversation across the bank from the other, in a way that suggests Wah as author of one, and Wong as author of the other (although this remains conjecture): “[…] hello David Thompson now this quiet water maps diesel along the marshes of locomotion crossing North down the map of the River of Heaven Steamboat Mountain are you worried about a future – […]” (pp 5-6). The book also includes a more direct conversation between the two authors on their project, in which they discuss the movement of how their project emerged. As they write:

FRED – I found in approaching our project, after we had decided to do this poem as long as the river, that I had to first shed my preconceptions, not about the river, but about what I could bring to the river. One of the greatest experiences of making this composition was finding out that I had to listen to the river to hear what resonations were available. You’re right. Language was something that bounced back from the river. I know you’ve done a lot of writing on water, and thinking with water generally, not just the river. You came to this project with a sense of water.

RITA – Water is infused throughout everything, everyone. We’re two-thirds water. While we’re talking about the river, it’s not just the river that ends at its banks. It’s the river that powers our cellphones, it’s the river that allows for the birds and the fish, all the people who rely on all that the river enlivens, all of it, that’s the river too. When we’re talking about water, we’re also talking about land, and we’re also talking about our bodies and ourselves. A lot of it is unconscious.

The book-length singular threads are reminiscent, slightly, of Darren Wershler’s The Tapeworm Foundry (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2000), a poem composed as a singular, book-length line that sat as page upon page of text blocks. In contrast, beholden is very much a pair of singular threads—that look like individual threads across the page—in dialogue, occasionally meeting to overlap, but moving at the same speed in a similar direction, along that same river, working through whatever differences, distances and divergences they might hold. Sitting as threads handwritten and typeset, the poem rolls and eddys the length of the river, writing out an argument for the waterway, ecological preservation, aboriginal land rights and simply the possibility of a continued ecological existence upon the earth. As one of their threads reads:

[…] the trees need the river and the river needs the trees and we need both river and trees in ways that are buried in bone and sinew, uncanny returns, shifting baseline syndrome no excuse for not learning the cultures of this land, better late than never to not take abundance generosity or humility for granted on this spinning earth, keep the language and the story honest, don’t call a reservoir a late… don’t naturalize the hubris, don’t hide the arrogance of destroying what you don’t understand. listen for what’s underneath the narrative of convenience, the inadequacy of speed and progress, or its deadly outcome, from the perspective of trees & herons & wolves, who remembers the before, the during and the after as we wait for the leap to take hold or for the machinery of greed to dig a mass grave for those who refused to learn to respect the land, the river, and those who were unwilling or unable to stop them. (pp 24-34)

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

Another friend tells you you have to learn not to absorb the world. She says sometimes she can hear her own voice saying silently to whomever—you are saying this thing and I am not going to accept it. Your friend refuses to carry what doesn’t belong to her.

You take in things you don’t want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.

American poet Claudia Rankine’s remarkable Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2014) is part memoir, part prose poem lyric, part film script/collaboration and part essay, exploring the subtleties, complexities and ugliness of racism in America. Her prose employs the strength of a punch and the subtleties of lyric, and often both at once, through allowing numerous brutal examples of racism exist without editorial or commentary. Set in a small handful of sections, Rankine’s fifth published poetry collection moves from lyric observation via the prose poem to aan essay on Serena Williams, and film scripts on and around Trayvon Martin, Hurricane Katrina and James Craig Anderson, writing out systematic and deeply held antagonisms and prejudices throughout a country attempting to properly engage with a series of ongoing cultural collisions. Rankine moves through the result of a hundred thousand paper cuts to outright brutality, constantly questioning and citing a series of abuses that come with being a black citizen of the United States in the early twenty-first century. Since the publication of this book last year, there have been dozens of widely-publicized aggressions, attacks and deaths due to a deeply held racist undertone across the United States, including the brutal murder of nine churchgoers in South Carolina and resulting battle over the Confederate flag, to the recent arrest and death of Sarah Bland (and, as I write this, I am fully aware that I live in a country guilty of its own crimes in that regard, including the third world conditions that many of our northern First Nations communities continue to live in).

Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.

For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler’s remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please.

Given this is the first work I’ve read by Rankine, I’m curious as to how this work connects, both structurally and in terms of content, with her earlier books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2004), and what her specific thoughts are in terms of what “lyric” actually means. As well, Rankine’s Citizen is part of a growing number of poetry works focused on the human costs and responsibilities of living in the world, and living in a multitude of overlapping, overlaying cultures, including Erín Moure’s trilogy— O Cidadán (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2002), Little Theatres (Anansi, 2005) and O Cadoiro, poems (Anansi, 2007)—to Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s collaborative Sybil Unrest (Vancouver BC: LineBooks, 2008; New Star Books, 2013) and Aaron Shurin’s more recent Citizen (San Francisco CA: City Lights Books, 2012). In her preface to her O Cidadán, Mouré wrote:

To intersect a word: citizen. To find out what could intend/distend it, today. O cidadán. A word we recognize though we know not its language. It can’t be found in French, Spanish, Portuguese dictionaries. It seems inflected “masculine.” And, as such, it has a feminine supplement. Yet if I said “a cidadá” I would only be speaking of 52% of the world, and it’s the remainder that inflects the generic, the cidadán. How can a woman then inhabit the general (visibly and semantically skewing it)? How can she speak from the generic at all, without vanishing behind its screen of transcendent value? In this book, I decided, I will step into it just by a move in discourse. I, a woman: o cidadán. As if “citizen” in our time can only be dislodged when spoken from a “minor” tongue, one historically persistent despite external and internal pressures, and by a woman who bears ― as lesbian in a civic frame ― a policed sexuality. Unha cidadán: a semantic pandemonium. If a name’s force or power is “a historicity … a sedimentation, a repetition that congeals,” (Butler) can the name be reinvested or infested, fenestrated … set in motion again? Unmoored? Her semblance? Upsetting the structure/stricture even momentarily. To en(in)dure, perdure.

Whereas Lai and Wong composed their poems as “trace movement through the long now and constitute evidence of some hopeful reaching towards friendly coexistence of multiple tactics/perspectives,” Rankine’s Citizen is an exposé, forcing an examination of what it really means to be a black citizen, specifically in the United States of America. Citizen does not exist to provide answers, but instead, focuses on forcing the reader/viewer to acknowledge that the problem exists at all, the implications of what that means, and how broadly felt and deeply ingrained it really is. For those of us on the outside of the experiences she writes about, one hopes that it forces an awareness of our own actions, whether active or passive, and responsibilities therein.